The History Channel "Home for the Holidays, the History of Thanksgiving"
Price: $211.99
Product Feature
- DVD
- Color and B&W
- Approximately 50 minutes
- Copyright 1997
- Released 2002 by A&E
Product Description
From the first Pilgrim celebration to the Macy's parade, here are the familiar stories and little-known facts behind one of our most beloved holidays.The History Channel "Home for the Holidays, the History of Thanksgiving" Review
Once a year I enjoy watching this program that celibrates the very American holiday of Thanksgiving. This year I was fortunate enough to be able to record it at midnight while the History Channel saw fit to inflict an entire day's worth of programming on aliens in outer space. (Did someone set the program on REPEAT and leave the studio to go home for the celebration)?Like Halloween, Thanksgiving was originally a European experience of fasting and praying that morphed into one of feasting and familial merriment. There are several myths that surround the holiday: Turkey was a main staple of the first Thanksgiving between settlers and Indians, the Indians just happened by and joined the celebration, and the Pilgrims called their first feast Thanksgiving. In fact the only evidence of the event survives in a letter from one of the Pilgrims, and it doesn't even mention turkey.
The first settlers were unlucky with the seeds they brought from Europe and planted in the sandy soil of New England. The Wampanoag tribe showed them how to plant corn and pumpkins. The turkey did not gain in popularity until the mid-nineteenth century when it was easier to get the fowl from farms where they were raised rather than finding a wild one or shooting game. Locals armed with muskets and several tankards of hard cider made the "turkey shoot" a sport. Those who could kill the moving but tethered bird got to take it home. It is more likely that the settlers ate corn, bass, cod, onions, argulla, lobster, craneberries, pumpkins, bread, blueberries, spinach and beer. The communal feast would be due to the declaration of communal law, shortly after landing. People had to surrender their private property for the good of the settlement. It also helped insure their survival. The Indians happened by, on the warpath so to speak, after hearing musket fire from Pilgrims. Both laid down their arms in favor of spoons.
Thanksgiving might have remained an informal, regional event if it wasn't for a widow from New Hampshire who made it her mission to bring the holiday to national attention. Sarah Joseptha Hale, editor of the most popular magazine of the day, promoted the idea of Thanksgiving as an American holiday. Starting in 1846, she lobbied senators, governors and presidents, hoping to reduce the growing regional strife. Mrs. Hale thought President Washington's suggestion of the last Thursday of the month in November, as the ideal date for the celebration. Abraham Lincoln took her suggestion and made it a proclamation, but still no law. Each president had to declare it a holiday every year.
Franklin Roosevelt attempted to change the holiday celebration to a week earlier to boost holiday shopping and the economy. It backfired. An incensed Congress made the last Thursday of the month an offical holiday in 1941.
Another part of the holiday is the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. (Just in case anyone thinks so, it wasn't part of the Pilgrims feast in 1621). In fact it was originally called Macy's Christmas Day parade, and it was suggested by immigrants in the employ of Mr. Macy, who recommended it, only Gimbels was the first one to do it in Philadelphia in 1920. The balloons were filled with helium and then allowed to float away until 1932 when one of them almost brought down a passing aircraft. The 2 1/2 mile route is viewed by 3 million people, and 50 million on television. Macy is also the second biggest consumer of helium just behind the federal government, and the balloons are kept in an old tootsie roll factory in New Jersey the rest of the year.
Football is also a holiday tradition, which began with Princeton and Yale in 1876. What better way to draw a large crowd! The National Football League took up the mantle with the Detroit Lions taking on the Chicago Bears. Other teams have since decided to knock helmets on the gridiron on Thanksgiving.
What makes Thanksgiving such a great holiday is that it is impartial. It is celebrated by people from all walks of life. It is apolitical. It is a time when people sit down and enjoy the company of family and friends, with (hopefully) a bounty of harvest before them. Watching sports rather than participating in them replaced an old English tradition, and a good snooze usually caps off the celebration.
This DVD is available at an exhorbitant price from the History Channel. I was lucky enough to capture it on the DVR. I recommend you do the same until the price comes down.
Hail, Mrs. Hale!
And, hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving!
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